When we’re talking about clicking drives, we can always connect it to physical damage to hard drive inside components, such as the failure in the head or preamplifier chip that is located on the headstack. But As one skilled hdd repair and data recovery engineer, you must also know clicking drives can be also caused by firmware corruption. If you want to secure your data, you must diagnose your clicking hard drives correctly and take the right hdd repair solution with professional hdd repair tools. You may want to know what others cause the hard drive clicking. Now let’s see some live examples by some clients in our data recovery lab:

Data Recovery Live Cases

Example 1: He told us his SATA drive was clicking and then he found it was due to the SATA connection was a little loose and when he pushed it further into the interface, his drive stopped clicking.
This is actually not real clicking but the power part of the SATA connection was not fully engaged. This would cause less than full power to be transferred to drive and it could cause “clicks” as drive spins up and then down because lack of power or unstable power supply.

Example 2: One client dropped his laptop when he took the city bus and after he went back to his office, powered on his laptop, he heard the clicking noises inside from the drive. This one was due to the head was striken and bent to touch the platter, luckily he turned off his laptop immediately and finally sent to our lab for a head swap in clean room and his data is recovered. As for physical hdd damage, the physical bad sectors (some scratches) can also cause clicking.

Example 3: One client used his desktop for 1 year and he couldn’t access to his PC and data when one day he was going to power on the computer and work. The drive was clicking due to firmware corruption. We repaired the clicking drive by regenerating the ROM module.

Usually hard drive clicking means that the drive is near failure. You should IMMEDIATELY copy everything to a back up device if it still allows and then have it checked out or you should turn it off and send to one professional data recovery company.

DFL-WDII Creative HDD Repair Solution To WD Clicking Drives

From above description, you can see it’s not easy to decide which is the actual cause to the hard drive clicking and here within Dolplhin Data Lab, we have created one unique hdd repair solution called ‘Force Loading’ with our new DFL-WDII hdd repair tool. This new hdd repair tool helps a lot to see the clicking is caused by physical head damage or firmware failure.

‘Force Loading’ is one creative hdd repair feature enables direct access to safe mode and have the clicking hard drive spinning up and then access to the firmware area and fix the firmware damage. This is one perfect and quick way to help users repair WD clicking hard drives by firmware failure.

If the ‘force loading’ works, it tells the failure of firmware modules, otherwise, it’s the head damage. Besides, you need to communicate with your clients and know what happened to the patient drives so that all the hdd repair process moves in a 100% right direction for maximum data recovery.

If you’re interested in our new creative WD HDD firmware repair tool-DFL-WDII, please feel free to contact us by sales@dolphindatalab.com or get a free quote here.